TELEVISION

TELEVISION; Oprah Winfrey's Odyssey: Talk-Show Host to Mogul

By PAT COLANDER; Pat Colander is editor of The Naperville City Star, a suburban Chicago weekly.

Published: March 12, 1989

CHICAGO—
Here is a typical story from the pages of the improbable career of Oprah Winfrey: It's 1984, the 30-year-old host of a Chicago morning talk show is in North Carolina, on the set of Steven Spielberg's film ''The Color Purple.'' Though she has no previous acting experience, she has been cast in an important supporting role in a lavish production of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Between takes, Ms. Winfrey is reading ''The Women of Brewster Place,'' a novel by Gloria Naylor that describes the lives of seven black women living in a slum building in a place that sounds much like Boston or Philadelphia but could be just about any urban ghetto. Ms. Winfrey decides that she will try to secure the rights to the property.

Now it's April 1988, on a street-facade back lot at Universal Studios. Filming is being completed on a four-hour, two-part ABC made-for-TV movie. Not only does Ms. Winfrey star in the production, she is executive co-producer of it; Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards) Productions, the company of which she is chief executive officer and major stockholder, is in charge of what has become a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

''I had gone from a situation where I was totally intimidated [ on the set of 'The Color Purple' ] and had no control, to a situation where I had all of it,'' Miss Winfrey said in a recent interview in her office at Harpo Productions in Chicago.

This kind of turnabout is not a novelty to Ms. Winfrey; her rise from supporting player to executive producer reflects her dramatic transformation from television personality to media mogul. ''The Women of Brewster Place'' which begins next Sunday evening at 9, with the conclusion on Monday, March 20, at the same hour, is but the first of a number of full-scale feature-film productions Harpo has planned. Ms. Winfrey and Harpo have acquired the rights to Toni Morrison's ''Beloved,'' a post-Civil War novel about a young, black woman haunted by slavery, and to ''Kaffir Boy,'' the autobiography of Mark Mathabane, a black man who grew up admid the poverty and degradation of apartheid South Africa. (Quincy Jones owns the rights to the 1937 novel by the folklorist Zola Neale Hurston, ''Their Eyes Were Watching God,'' along with Harpo. Many consider the book to be the definitive work about a black woman's coming of age in America.) Harpo is also committed to producing three hourlong prime-time specials each year for the next five years; they will be made available to stations that carry Ms. Winfrey's talk show. The first, ''No One Dies Alone,'' which was broadcast last year, was a docudrama based on a Washington Post Sunday Magazine article about a family shattered when one of its members is murdered. In addition to being executive producer, Ms. Winfrey served as host of the special. Details of the upcoming specials have yet to be firmed up.

In fact, most Harpo projects are stalled at the moment. Of Ms. Winfrey's 40 employees - the majority are women in their 30's - 18 work for ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' and 21 work at Harpo Productions, most of them in public-relations.. (At present, the film production and prime-time specials area has two full-time employees.) The small company will not be going ahead with any feature film making until the renovation of an 88,000-square-foot film and television production facility that will be Harpo's studios is completed early next year.

Harpo Studios, which will fill an entire square block just west of downtown Chicago, will be the largest film and television production house in the Middle West. It will also be the permanent home of ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' - which Ms. Winfrey was able to gain ownership of from Cap Cities/ABC last November - along with several movie and television production studios and Harpo's corporate offices.

Ms. Winfrey, whose net worth is estimated at upwards of $40 million, signs every check and makes all major decisions about Harpo projects. (Both the size of Harpo's business and Ms. Winfrey's approach to it were reflected in a committee set up two-and-a-half years ago by Jeffrey Jacobs, Ms. Winfrey's attorney as well as chief operating officer at Harpo Productions and a minor investor in the company. The committee, which makes periodic investment recommendations, consists of two advisers from Goldman Sachs, two from the trust department of the Harris Bank, one from the bond department at the Exchange National Bank and an accountant who is a tax partner at Price Waterhouse.) ''If you're not taking responsibility for what you've earned, you could lose it,'' Ms. Winfrey said, adding with a laugh, ''It would be easier to just go shopping.''

She finds the power - her talk show is seen by approximately 10 million people each weekday - and the money ''humbling,'' she said, and the more successful she is, the stronger she feels about her commitment to important work.

''You can never lose sight of the work,'' she said. Ms. Winfrey sees her mission as education and her medium as the black experience. ''I really want to bring people closer to knowing themselves,'' she said. ''In a society that is so media controlled, doing good film is one of the best ways to raise consciousness. You present the story and then you let people choose to change the way things are or not. I want to make a difference. I want that on my tombstone.''